Johnston Now Honors: Excellence in Arts winner shared her love of art with her students

By RANDY CAPPS

Smithfield resident Patricia Goldsmith spent decades teaching graphic design and offset printing in Pitt and Wake County schools, touching countless lives and fanning the flames of a host of artistic visions along the way.

It’s for her own talent, and her pouring into her students, that she’s been named the 2023 Johnston Now Honors Excellence in Arts Award winner.

Were it not for the kindness of others, however, it might not have happened at all. Growing up in Atlantic City, she wasn’t expecting to have the means to attend college.

“I grew up Catholic,” she said. “Went to 12 years of Catholic school. I lived across the street from a Methodist church, and I socialized with those kids a lot growing up. At the 11th hour, they gave me a $300 scholarship to go to school.”

There wasn't a spot available for her in the New Jersey area, but a brother-in-law stationed at what was then known as Fort Bragg suggested East Carolina. And off she went.

At first she wanted to go into chemistry, but didn’t enjoy the math that was involved.

“I was visiting the art department one day, and I was

looking around,” she said. “I had never had any courses in art, but the instinct was there. I was looking and I was thinking, ‘that looks like fun.’ I went to the dean, and typically you’d need a portfolio, but I talked to him and said, ‘just let me take one or two courses and see how it goes.’ I got A’s and changed majors. That was it.”

Goldsmith’s mother had a high school diploma, but her father did not. He was self-taught, however, and not entirely thrilled with her choice of majors.

“When I told him I was majoring in art, he had a hissy fit,” she said. “But when I told him I wanted to be a teacher, it was ‘let me introduce you to my daughter, the teacher.’”

“They both gave me that work ethic that I tried to give to my students, too. It’s so important.”

She taught graphic design at North Pitt High School for 11 years, then spent the next eight as the production manager for the N.C. Catholic Newspaper.

“I had one of the first MacIntoshes that Steve Jobs ever made in 1983,” she said, overseeing the paper’s modernization and the transition from typewriters and paste up to computers.

She spent a year writing grants and working with Goodwill Industries of Wake County before going to work at Athens Drive in 1990 and teaching graphic design and offset printing there for 20 years.

“Having paid for my education, I was determined to teach for at least one year to prove to myself I could do it,” she said with a laugh. “And the rest is history. It just fit like a glove. It wasn’t so much the subject matter. It was just being with the kids and teaching them and watching them grow into something. Passing along not just art or graphic design or the skills of offset printing, … but life skills. Hopefully, somewhere along the way, it served somebody well.”

She retired in the summer of 2010, and has spent that time seeing the world.

“I drank tea in the Dalai Lama’s living room,” she said. “He wasn’t there, of course.”

This includes an impressive list of famous museums, too.

“Each museum has a different speciality,” she said. “It’s not like going up to Washington to the Smithsonian.”

She was especially struck by Picasso’s “Guernica,” which she saw in Madrid at the Prado.

“You see it in a book, and it’s like this big,” she said, holding her hands a few inches apart. “But it’s this massive wall. And the imagery that portrays the suffering and the war and all those things going on was poignant.”

She also enjoys gardening, photography, the Red Hat Society and — of course — dabbling in graphic design for churches and nonprofit organizations.

One of those retirement projects was documenting the sanctuary mosaics built for Saint Ann Catholic Church, which isn’t far from her home in Smithfield.

Mosaic artist Jorge Luis Piña Rosales built the mosaics piece by piece in Mexico, numbered them and shipped them to the church.

The entire process is captured in a Shutterfly book, which includes Goldsmith’s writing, photography and design.

It’s one of many Shutterfly books that she’s made, since she does them for all of her travels — which most recently includes Bosnia and the surrounding countries that once formed Yugoslavia.

“Don’t wait until you retire to travel,” she said. “It opens your mind.”

As that trek from Atlantic City to Greenville did for her and countless others.